A Trip Down Monster Kid Memory Lane with Roger Corman

The great Roger Corman, master of the quick and cheap exploitation picture, producer and distributor of hundreds of films, and mentor to a whole generation of influential filmmakers and actors, passed away on May 9th of this year at the age of 98.

Roger Corman on the set of The Trip (1967; Wikimedia Commons)

Rather than duplicate a career summary that you can get in a thousand different places on the web, I thought I’d honor Roger by reminiscing about his influence on this particular Monster Kid growing up in the midwest in the ‘60s and ‘70s.

I’ve told this story before, so bear with me if it feels like a case of deja vu all over again. Living in central Iowa in the mid-‘60s was Monster Kid Heaven. On Friday nights, one of the Des Moines TV stations ran sci-fi movies, introducing me to such thrilling delights as The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms, Earth vs. the Flying Saucers and the like (there were also duds like Teenage Monster or Giant from the Unknown, but being a resilient kid, I took the bad with good and was grateful that my ever-suffering parents allowed me to stay up to watch this stuff at all).

Then on Saturday nights, my local station presented Gravesend Manor, which was hosted by the wacky ensemble cast of Malcolm, the butler of the manor, his vampire buddy the Duke, cigar-chomping Esmeralda, and Claude, the mute, put-upon assistant. Gravesend Manor was the icing on the weekend monster cake, showing selections from the Shock Theater package featuring the classic Universal monsters, with a few non-horror mysteries and thrillers thrown in (it was always a letdown when the familiar monsters failed to make an appearance, but on the up-side, anticipation would then build for the next week).

To say the least, the one-two, Friday-Saturday punch of sci-fi thrills and Universal monster chills made a deep mark on my very impressionable mind. After all, here I am, decades upon decades later, and I’m still revisiting these films and posting about them.

I didn’t realize it at the time, but Roger Corman (and to give credit where it’s due, frequent writing collaborator Charles B. Griffith) had crept into my young head and were occupying it every bit as much as my beloved Universal monsters. I’d be lying to say I was impressed with every Corman film that showed up on Friday nights. I wouldn’t become familiar with the term “production values” until much later, but I knew cheap when I saw it.

These weren’t what you'd call polished pictures, but they still made an impression. For instance, the giant mutated crabs of Attack of the Crab Monsters (1957), with their lidded googly eyes and frowny faces, look like live-action cartoons. But there’s something very un-cartoony about the premise of giant irradiated crabs not only consuming human beings, but absorbing their consciousness and using that ability to lure more unsuspecting human prey into their maws (or whatever it is crabs eat with).

Okay, so giant crabs throwing their voices like ventriloquists, imitating the people they just ate for lunch is ridiculous on its face, but also creepy as hell. And then there’s the other doom facing the scientists -- the island they’re stranded on is quickly breaking up and falling into the sea. Even though the idea is wacky in the extreme, it still somehow resonated.

“The Most Terrifying Horror Ever Loosed on a Shuddering Earth!”

“A horror film has got to have something in every single scene, so the audience never has a chance to sit back for more than a moment. These films are constructed very carefully -- you do have to give people a few moments to relax and then come back into it. My main goal in Crab Monsters was to integrate tension into each scene, leading to the horror conclusion.” -- Roger Corman, The Movie World of Roger Corman (edited by J. Philip di Franco, Chelsea House, 1979)

Speaking of approaching Doom, it was Roger Corman who introduced 10-year-old me to the Apocalyptic variety via Last Woman on Earth (1960), an ultra-cheap fantasy-melodrama featuring a fatal love triangle between end-of-the-world survivors Betsy Jones-Moreland, Antony Carbone and future Oscar-winning screenwriter Robert Towne (who, in addition to writing, took acting gigs while he was still getting his feet wet in Hollywood).

I know, I know -- what in the world was a 10 year old boy doing watching something like that? Well, it was on one of those precious late-night creature shows, and in the olden days before video on demand, you took what they gave you and liked it.

“Liked” is maybe too strong a word in the case of Last Woman. Compared to all-out nuclear war resulting in a decimated earth filled with irradiated mutants, Last Woman’s apocalypse is almost gentle -- the trio had been scuba diving in Puerto Rico when a mysterious event depleted all the oxygen in the atmosphere just long enough to kill off everyone not breathing through some sort of gear. The film is a mostly slow-moving affair, with the survivors wandering around, bickering among themselves until the inevitable climactic blow-up.

This was a guaranteed snoozer for a prepubescent Monster Kid, with one exception. As the trio is walking through the streets of San Juan wondering what the hell happened, they encounter the body of a little girl lying like a large rag doll on the sidewalk. Needless to say, this got my attention, since one of the great unwritten rules of film violence is that adults are fair game, but kids and dogs are not. Disturbing as it was (especially as I wasn’t much older than the girl), this scene made the film Memorable, and automatically exempted it from the mental Dud pile.

“On an island of tropical splendor, these three must make their own world, their own new code of morals...”

A definite Dud (at least at the time) was the other film Corman made while shooting down in Puerto Rico, Creature from the Haunted Sea (1961). (Roger wanted the most bang for his buck when he invested in location shooting, so he was always looking to get an additional movie out of the deal.)

Featuring the same acting trio as Last Woman, Corman’s Creature is a comedy-horror mash-up about an American gangster who agrees to transport the deposed officials of a Caribbean banana republic to a safe harbor, but secretly plans to relieve them of their lives and treasure while blaming everything on a made-up sea monster.

Some of the comedy bits are cringey even for a 10-year-old, and the monster is comically cheap-looking, literally made from random household items. But screenwriter Charles Griffith’s premise is clever and adult for a cheap drive-in flick, and there are some wry comic moments to reward those who can look past its faults (see my full review here).

“It’s alright, be calm everybody, the boat’s insured!”

Much more in line with my Monster Kid sensibilities was Day the World Ended (1955), which was set in a more traditional apocalyptic post-nuclear war landscape, featuring a band of quarreling survivors threatened by a single (and singular) irradiated mutant (others are hinted at, but the budget apparently could only bear the cost of one monster suit).

Marty the Mutant, as the creature would come to be affectionately dubbed, was the creation of Paul Blaisdell, an independent effects artist who was highly ingenious and economical, and the go-to guy for several of Corman’s 50’s creatures. (Paul also saved costs by wearing the suit himself.)

Marty is positively demonic-looking, with pointed bat-like ears, horns growing out of his head, and three eyes (you scoff, but are you absolutely sure radiation from a nuclear war wouldn’t produce a Marty or two?). Marty’s evil looks are interesting enough, but he’s also somewhat sympathetic, with a psychic connection to one of the normie survivors that puts him a grade above the typical ‘50s B monster.

“The Screen’s New High in Naked, Screaming Terror!”

But the ultimate Corman-Blaisdell creature collaboration was Beulah, the squat, fierce-looking Venusian vegetable monster from It Conquered the World (1956). Beulah didn't quite achieve the lofty goal of the title mainly because, for budgetary reasons, she tried the conquering thing all by herself.

Although she may not look it to the untrained eye, Beulah was the Corman-Blaisdell team’s highest-concept creature. Corman and Blaisdell reasoned that in such an alien environment as Venus’, vegetables rather than animals might have reached the highest stage of sentient being. That alone wasn’t groundbreaking, given that the humanoid alien in The Thing from Another World (1951) was supposed to be an ambulatory vegetable.

Blaisdell took it a step farther with the idea that any kind of humanoid would be crushed by Venus’ atmospheric pressure (not to mention melted by the heat, but we digress), so natural selection would favor some other form of body type. And so, the squat, conical would-be conqueror Beulah was born. Once again, Blaisdell wore the suit himself (which was more like a small parade float with moveable arms than a suit).

Like many such other slow-moving menaces, would-be victims had to almost throw themselves at the creature, but there’s no denying that Beulah is unique in the annals of B sci-fi. (For more on Beulah, click here.)

“The Most Terrifying Monster the Mind of Man Can Conceive!”

“The first day we were shooting [It Conquered the World], I took the creature out. Beverly Garland, the leading lady, went over and looked at the creature. Standing over it, she said, ‘So you’ve come to conquer the world, eh? Take that!' and she kicked it.” -- The Movie World of Roger Corman

(I love that these creatures have nicknames.While they don’t represent the height of creature effects even for the time, they are wackily idiosyncratic with their exaggerated, frowning monster faces, and a refreshing change from all the giant insects and various other enlarged monsters that proliferated during the decade.)

This post wouldn’t be complete without addressing one other solitary invader from the ‘50s Corman archive. A year after Beulah failed to conquer the world, Corman had another alien set up shop in Southern California. Although he was Not of This Earth, Paul Johnson (Paul Birch) could definitely pass for human by covering up his cloudy, all-white eyes with dark glasses. Lacking a creature like Beulah, Not of This Earth (1957) had to compensate with some other-worldly ideas.

Johnson, looking like the original Man in Black, is an alien from the planet Davana who has come to Earth in search of uncontaminated blood (it seems his people have been sickened with blood disease as the result of a nuclear war.) To aid in his mission, Johnson has a matter transporter and holographic communicator installed in a closet (!) of his comfortable ranch-style home.

Posing as a man with a mysterious blood disease, Johnson enlists the unwitting aid of a doctor and nurse (Beverly Garland) to receive regular blood transfusions. The stakes couldn’t be higher: if the transfusions work, Johnson’s home planet will invade and subjugate the earth for access to healthy human blood. If they don’t, the earth will be destroyed.

I confess I was not too impressed with the movie the first go-round. It was slow moving and talky, and the alien menace, despite the disturbing eyes, was just a doughy middle-aged man in black (Johnny Cash he was not). However, a couple of scenes kept me from falling asleep.

In the first, Johnson is perturbed by a vacuum cleaner salesman who shows up on his doorstep (played by Corman mainstay Dick Miller). Sensing an opportunity, the alien invites the man down to the cellar for a demonstration of the product. Blathering away as he tries to make a sale, Miller’s character belatedly senses something’s not right, takes a look at Johnson’s featureless eyes, does a double-take, then looks forlornly at the camera for a brief moment before being dispatched by the space vampire.

This was my introduction to breaking the fourth wall, and it's a perfect example of the black humor that peppered Corman’s films and made even pre-pubescent Monster Kids like me sit up and take notice.

“Look buddy, let me have five minutes of your time in your own cellar, and I’ll prove to you that this little baby can do what no other vacuum cleaner in the world can do!”

Another sit-up-and-take-notice moment comes later when Johnson has been exposed as an alien invader. Deciding that he’s done with the doctor, the alien dispatches a flying, umbrella-like creature that wraps itself around the victim’s head and, well, maybe it’s best not to use your imagination.

The creature is a creepy forerunner of Alien’s infamous face-hugger. While this and the Dick Miller bit weren’t quite enough to redeem the film for me that first time, subsequent viewings revealed a wryly subtle take on mid-century American paranoia and strange agents hiding in plain sight in sunny Suburbia.

Whether the film hooked viewers the first time, or, as in my case, required repeat viewing to appreciate, it certainly has had an outsized impact for an early Corman exploitation flick, having been remade twice (most famously in 1988 with Traci Lords in the Beverly Garland role).

The ultimate Roger Corman cheapie that rewards repeat viewings is of course The Little Shop of Horrors (1960), which, appropriately enough, also enjoys the biggest cult reputation of all -- much of it due to its resurrection via a Broadway musical and a big budget remake.

This tale of a nerdy flower shop employee and his co-dependent relationship with a man-eating plant was made in a couple of days on a next-to-nothing budget. Full of ad-libbed dialog and seemingly ad-libbed sight gags, Little Shop is perhaps one of the unlikelier cult hits in cinematic history. Somehow, scenes that by themselves might seem sophomoric or forced -- like a duel to the death with dentist’s tools -- come together in a surreal package that has something for everyone (well, almost everyone).

It’s as if the super-accelerated production got the casts’ adrenaline going and brought out everyone’s best. There are physical bits and sight gags for Stooges fans and puns and malapropisms for the more verbally oriented (enough that it takes several viewings to fully take it all in). It’s hard not to like something about it.

Still, Little Shop was an unlikely attraction for a Monster Kid weaned on the more dignified Universal Monsters, but I was thrilled whenever it played on one of my creature features.

“Where a talking, man-eating plant gives Homicide something to think about!”

“If Bucket [A Bucket of Blood, 1960] and Little Shop, two of the cheapest films I ever directed myself, look like they were made on a bet, they pretty much were. In the middle of 1959, when AIP wanted me to make a horror film but had only $50,000 available I felt it was time to take a risk, do something fairly outrageous. I shot Bucket on only a few sets in five days. When the film worked well, I did Little Shop in two days on a leftover set just to beat my speed record.” -- Roger Corman (with Jim Jerome), How I Made a Hundred Movies in Hollywood and Never Lost a Dime, Da Capo Press, 1998, p. 62

Roger Corman inevitably graduated to bigger and better things, starting with the elegant Poe films he made with Vincent Price for American International Pictures. The man never stopped working, producing hundreds of films over the decades -- and as if that wasn’t enough, he somehow found time to do cameo appearances in some of his former mentees’ pictures.

But none of those achievements will ever fully eclipse the wonderfully quirky cheapies from the early years.They weren’t great films, but they invariably turned a profit, and Corman gained the kind of experience and smarts that money (especially bloated Hollywood budgets) can’t buy. But best of all, he created indelible memories for a whole generation of monster-loving kids.

Jack Nicholson's Big Breakdown: The Cry Baby Killer

Now Playing: The Cry Baby Killer (1958)

Pros: Generally solid acting; several good moments of suspense and psychological drama; good jazz score
Cons: One of the more interesting characters disappears midway through; too much talk from the adults and not enough teen delinquency

This post is part of 'The Favorite Stars in B Movies' blogathon hosted by yours truly. Please check out the contributions from my fellow bloggers on a wide array of stars who appeared in B movies on their way up or down the career ladder, or who made Bs their own personal domain.

• Blogathon: Day 1
• Day 2
• Day 3

Superstars have to start somewhere. Sports stars typically prove themselves by grinding through a long succession of school, amateur and/or minor league programs. The path to movie stardom is more circuitous and subject to luck (that is, if you’re not part of an established Hollywood family), but over the years, B movies have helped serve as the minor leagues for aspiring stars.

“King of the Bs” Roger Corman has been producing movies since the mid-1950s. Once he perfected the art of making films quickly, cheaply and profitably, he reinvested the proceeds and leveraged his knowledge to become a sort of Hollywood minor league commissioner and film school director rolled into one.

The list of high-powered Hollywood icons who learned their craft on Corman productions is a long one. Among directors, such household names as Peter Bogdanovich, James Cameron, Francis Ford Coppola, Jonathan Demme, Ron Howard, and Martin Scorsese, among others, got invaluable early experience from “The Roger Corman Film School.” 

Actors who got career boosts working for Roger include such luminaries as Charles Bronson, Sandra Bullock, David Carradine, Robert De Niro, Tommy Lee Jones and Sylvester Stallone.

In 2010 Corman received a long overdue honorary Academy Award for his “rich engendering of films and filmmaking.”

One of Roger’s most successful “engenderment” projects is Jack Nicholson, a 12 time Oscar nominee and 3 time winner. Although Corman helped jumpstart many acting careers that were already spluttering along, Nicholson was only 20 and had just one small TV part to his credit when he was picked for the title role in The Cry Baby Killer (Corman was executive producer and financed the film).

Who knew this man would go on to collect all those Oscar statuettes?

Cry Baby wasn’t the most auspicious of debuts -- the movie is only an hour long, and Nicholson spends most of his screen time pouting, scowling and waving a gun around. But it was the start of a productive relationship that saw Jack appearing in seven more Corman productions. In addition, under Roger’s tutelage Jack secured a producer credit for the western Ride in the Whirlwind (1966) and two writing credits, for Ride and the groundbreaking psychedelic exploitation film The Trip (1967).

Jack later summed up his work with Corman in typical Nicholsonian fashion: “He saved all of our careers. He kept us working when no one else would hire us. For this, we are all eternally grateful. For the fact that he was able to underpay us, he is eternally grateful.” [Philip di Franco, ed., The Movie World of Roger Corman, Chelsea House, 1979, p. 134.]

Corman may have wished he’d paid the cast of Cry Baby Killer even less -- it was the frugal producer’s first movie that failed to make a profit in its theatrical release (although it eventually recouped its costs with sales to TV).

Certainly all the elements of ‘50s drive-in popularity were there: a title character with James Dean-like angst, teen gang fights, gunplay, a tense stand-off with the cops in a hostage situation, and of course, adult squares looking on disapprovingly of the whole mess.

Roger Corman (center) holds hearings on why Cry Baby Killer didn't earn more at the box office.
(Or is this his cameo as a U.S. Senator in Godfather II? Hmmm... I'll get back to you...)

It’s hard to imagine in our current age of ubiquitous smartphones, social media and video games, but back in the day teens spent much of their free time engaging with the real world, and as a result had a lot more potential for getting into trouble.

Although the U.S. emerged from WWII more prosperous and powerful than ever, Americans spent much of the following decade finding things to be anxious about, from supposed communists in Washington and Hollywood, to the Bomb, to -- you guessed it -- teenagers that spelled Trouble with a capital T.

The “Greatest Generation” was resentful of youths who had the audacity to enjoy the freedoms and prosperity that had been bequeathed to them. Teenagers were the new anti-Boy Scouts: Untrustworthy, unhelpful, unfriendly, unkind, disobedient, sullen, cowardly and definitely not reverent.

Congress set about investigating the baleful influence of comic books, and religious zealots across the country denounced rock and roll as the Devil’s music designed to lead kids astray. 

Hollywood jumped on the juvenile delinquent bandwagon with pictures like The Wild One (1953), The Blackboard Jungle (1955) and Rebel Without a Cause (1955). The problem, at least from the censorious adult perspective, was that in trying to maximize ticket sales, the studios made bad kids, exemplified by the likes of James Dean, positively glamorous (okay, maybe not so much in the screenshot below).

James Dean paved the tearful way for teen anti-heroes like the Cry Baby Killer.

Bad kids were so good for business that movie screens exploded with Untamed Youth (1957) Running Wild (1955) and committing Crime in the Streets (1956). And it wasn’t just the boys who were leading the charge into delinquency and degradation. Hot Rod Girl(s) (1956), High School Hellcats (1958) and various Girls on the Loose (1958) competed with the males to Live Fast, Die Young (1958) or else pay their debts to society as Reform School Girl(s) (1957).

Roger Corman was never one to let a hot topic go unexploited, and indeed, he dove into it with a vengeance, producing four teen-oriented films in 1957 alone: Rock All Night, Teenage Doll, Carnival Rock and Sorority Girl.

The next year Corman rode the crest of the teen wave with Hot Car Girl, Teenage Caveman (playing off the popularity of I Was a Teenage Werewolf and I Was a Teenage Frankenstein that had come out the year before), and of course, Cry Baby Killer.

Somehow, Jack Nicholson’s big screen debut ended up being the box office weakling in this gang. It may not have helped that the teen delinquency movie market was thoroughly saturated by this point. But Cry Baby has its share of problems beyond the obviously miniscule budget.

Jack plays Jimmy Wallace, an average teenager who gets beaten up in the opening scene by the school alpha male Manny (Brett Halsey) and his cackling cronies Joey (Ralph Reed) and Al (James Fillmore). Of course, the fight is over a girl, Carole (Carolyn Mitchell).

Jimmy’s friend Fred helps him get back on his feet while Manny takes his crew to the local diner, where he meets up with Carole. Manny holds court in the diner like the King of Teenland, and he has a cruel streak to match. He browbeats Carole into denouncing poor Jimmy as a punk while Joey eggs everyone on.

Jimmy shows up at the diner with Fred in tow to reclaim his girl Carole. When things look like they’re getting out of hand, the diner owner, Pete Gambelli (Frank Richards), barks at everyone to take it outside.

Jimmy confronts Manny as he holds court at the diner.

When the simmering confrontation turns into yet another fight, Jimmy grabs the gun that Al was wearing in his waistband, and off camera, shots ring out.

Policeman Glen Gannon (John Shay), who has been outside flirting with Julie (Lynn Cartwright), a waitress at the diner, confronts Jimmy, who is still holding the gun. At just the wrong time, a young mother with an infant (Barbara Knudson as Mrs. Maxton) exits the restrooms, and oblivious to the drama unfolding, walks into the standoff.

From the adjacent storeroom, Sam, the kitchen assistant (Smoki Whitfield), sees the woman’s dilemma and stealthily pulls her to safety into the building. Confused and scared, Jimmy refuses to throw down the gun and instead slowly backs into the storeroom and shuts the door.

Now Jimmy’s in a real fix -- he thinks he’s killed Manny and Al, and he’s backed himself into a corner as an accidental hostage-taker. The lives of an innocent man, woman and baby hang in the balance as the panicky young man grapples with what to do next.

"Will somebody please tell me today's diner specials?!"

One of Cry Baby’s biggest problems is that its title character isn’t all that interesting. All we know about Jimmy is that he’s infatuated with Carole and he’s willing to get beaten up in desperate attempts to claim her as his girl. He’s somewhat scruffy looking and not all that bright. In the climactic standoff, he alternates between pouting and yelling at the woman to shut her baby up. Ultimately Nicholson would score a true breakout role in another low-budget youth picture, Easy Rider.

In contrast, Brett Halsey’s Manny is handsome, stylish (he wears a jacket and tie to his fights!), and self-assured to a fault. He has his own retinue of lackeys, and commands people and places with ease. He’s a mafia don, or maybe a Fortune 500 CEO, in the making. Even the middle-aged diner owner sucks up to Manny and looks the other way as he spikes his friends’ drinks with alcohol. He’s the privileged, amoral character you love to hate.

Instead of setting up a dramatic climactic clash between underdog Jimmy and his alphadog nemesis, Cry Baby dispenses with Manny mid-way through the film (we don’t even see him get carted off to the hospital after the gunshots), and introduces Jimmy to a new nemesis, a crying baby (which, come to think of it, gives a disturbing new meaning to the title -- don’t worry, no babies were harmed in the plot or filming of this motion picture!).

"Of course I wear Pierre Cardin to all my gang fights - why do you ask?"

During the standoff, it’s the adults who steal most of the scenes. Upright, serious-as-death Lt. Porter (Harry Lauter) takes over the crime scene (and several of the film’s scenes) delivering fatherly advice to the innocent and a good old-fashioned throttling to the guilty, specifically Joey, whose smartass attitude is too much for the exasperated cop. Porter even reads the riot act to the slimy diner owner Gambelli, who he finds out was allowing Manny and his friends to sneak alcohol into the establishment.

But it’s Julie the world-weary waitress who delivers the film’s most searing indictment of youth culture. We learn from her conversations with patrolman Gannon that Julie is a widowed single mom who is barely scraping by. Mid-way through the stand-off, when she sees that Carole is only thinking of herself and whining about the possibility of going to jail, she delivers a zinger:

"I’ve been working in this dump for six months and I’ve seen a lot like you. You think because you’re 16 the world owes you something… well it doesn’t. You get what you work for, and you work to get Manny Cole! You’ll wind up in the gutter before you’re old enough to vote!"

It’s a powerful scene, but the film spends too much time on adults standing around bemoaning the “youth of today," slowing things down and distracting from the very real drama of the hostage situation.

In addition to the overly-long scenes of Lt. Porter interviewing witnesses and Julie chatting up the lonely bachelor cop, there’s a lot of business around the carnival atmosphere that develops as the standoff plays out. Several of Corman’s regulars show up as onlookers. Ed Nelson, who plays a TV reporter, had already made a half dozen Bs for Corman, including Rock All Night, Teenage Doll and The Brain Eaters, and would make several more before becoming a fixture on TV. (Corman himself makes a blink-and-you'll-miss-it appearance as the TV truck flunky).

Two other Corman regulars, Bruno VeSota and Leo Gordon, appear intermittently as a pair of chuckleheads kibitzing with the crowd and impatiently waiting for something bad to happen. Gordon, who is credited with Cry Baby’s story as well as co-writer on the screenplay, has a couple of choice lines, including a rant as he grabs the TV reporter’s microphone:

"I’ll tell you what I think mister, they oughta take these punk kids, throw ‘em in jail and throw away the key! My old man, if I did something wrong, he’d really sort me out!”

Leo Gordon and Bruno VeSota do their poor man's Abbott and Costello routine.

The line is especially ironic, considering that Gordon, who ended up with a couple hundred acting credits and dozens for writing, was an authentic tough guy (and presumed juvenile delinquent) who had served five years at San Quentin for armed robbery before getting his first acting break. One of his directors, Don Siegel, called him “the scariest man I have ever met!” [IMDb]

But apparently Gordon wasn’t scary enough to prevent his script from being messed with. Corman recalled being unpleasantly surprised when, upon returning from an overseas trip and checking in on the production, he was informed by his assistant that everything was great and they had “licked the script.”

"I said, ‘What do you mean, licked the script? It was a fine script. There was nothing wrong with that script.’ He [the assistant] said, ‘It had all kinds of problems. We’ve rewritten it totally and we solved all those problems.’ Well, they had wrecked the script, but were to begin shooting in two days. We put back a few things, but it was too late. The only good thing about the film was that Jack Nicholson made his debut in the picture and did a very nice job. … Leo Gordon, who wrote the original script, had one good line. Playing a bystander, he said, ‘Teenagers -- we never had ‘em when I was a kid.’ I think that was true.’"  [The Movie World of Roger Corman, p. 17]

Roger was definitely proud to have given Nicholson his feature film debut, but he’s a little too hard on the film. In spite of its problems, the acting is generally solid, and it has several good moments of suspense and psychological drama. Plus, the brass jazz score by Gerald Fried livens things up considerably (also of note is the title song "Cry Baby, Cry," which is quite an anthem for the bottom half of a drive-in double bill.)

Jack was on the verge of tears when he finally saw his paycheck for Cry Baby Killer.

Cry Baby Killer could have been improved with more backstory for Jimmy (admittedly difficult for a 60 minute movie), and more of Manny, who is so delightfully bad that we’re sorry to see him get shot and disappear midway through. But hey, it was Jack’s party, and he got to cry like he wanted to.

Where to find it: Streaming 1 | Streaming 2

There’s no Diesel in this Roger Corman vehicle: The Fast and the Furious

Now Playing: The Fast and the Furious (1954)

Pros: Classic hard-boiled dialog; Dorothy Malone as a kidnapped socialite with Stockholm Syndrome is very good.
Cons: The racing action is mostly limited to the last 10 minutes of the movie.

This post is part of the Corman-verse Blogathon hosted by Barry at Cinematic Cartharsis and Gill at Realweegiemidget Reviews. After you finish up your visit here, head on over to their blogs to further explore the multiverse of producer/director/writer/actor Roger Corman. 

I believe I’ve mentioned that I’m old at least a couple of times on this blog (as if the films that I write about weren’t a big tip-off). To give you an idea of how old, I grew up watching TVs with vacuum tubes and rabbit ear antennas, used rotary dial phones to make calls over party lines, and filled up cars that were almost as heavy as army tanks with leaded gas that cost the princely sum of 40 cents a gallon.

I mention this only to put the enduring career of Roger Corman into some kind of context. I am as old as dirt, yet here is a man who produced his first movie before I was even born, and is still working to this very day! I will pause a moment to let that sink in…

Okay, back to business.

The Fast and the Furious was one of Roger Corman’s earliest producing gigs, and was groundbreaking not only for Corman’s career, but for the legendary American International Pictures, which at the time was a fledgling start-up known as American Releasing Corporation. More on that later.

Clocking in at a fast 73 minutes, The Fast and the Furious tells the story of a desperate man, Frank Webster (John Ireland), who has escaped from prison after being convicted of a bum murder rap. The film opens with Frank trying to be inconspicuous while he gets a quick bite to eat at a roadside diner.

A nosy trucker (Bruno VeSota), strikes up a conversation with Webster and ends up offering him a ride. But with news of the escape all over the radio, the trucker quickly becomes suspicious and pulls a gun, hoping to make a citizen’s arrest.

Webster grabs the gun and coldcocks the rotund trucker. With no other way to get out of there fast, he kidnaps attractive socialite Connie Adair (Dorothy Malone), who is in the wrong place at the wrong time, and forces her to ride off with him in her expensive Jaguar sports car.

This nosy citizen is about to get a knuckle sandwich at the greasy spoon diner.

In theory, it should be a quick run to the Mexican border in the souped-up Jag, but word of the kidnapping has gotten out, and state troopers have set up numerous roadblocks.

To compound Webster’s headaches, Connie is a smart, capable woman who is constantly thinking of ways to escape or attract the attention of the authorities. He alternately threatens her with the gun or ties her up to prevent her from running off. At one point, he even wraps his arms around her in the open-air car as they spend a cold night on a remote mountain road.

The roadblocks seem insurmountable until Webster notices a number of sports cars passing through the police checkpoints. They’re on their way to an event that Connie is very familiar with -- an international race that starts in Southern California and finishes up across the Mexican border.

Webster slickly maneuvers the Jaguar into the line of cars bound for the event and pretends he’s one of the racers, even getting a police motorcycle escort to the event staging area. At this point Connie is very conflicted about Webster. She’s attracted to him in spite of herself, helping her kidnapper register for the race under an assumed name and fending off her wealthy friends who are overly curious about the new man in her life.

Producer Roger Corman doubles as a clueless state trooper.

During some downtime before the race, Webster tells Connie his tale of woe -- he was an independent trucker who attracted the attention of a mob-run trucking company. When he refused to join up, one of their goons tried to run him off the road, but ended up crashing and killing himself. Another goon testified that Webster was the aggressor, and so he ended up in jail.

Connie completely buys the story, and begs Webster to turn himself in. Understandably leery of the “justice” system, Webster is determined to carry through with his plan to race to the border and freedom, and locks Connie up in a shack near the race staging area so that she won’t be tempted to turn him in.

Anyone expecting even a fraction of the crazy energy and stunt work of the Vin Diesel-led Fast and Furious franchise will be sorely disappointed. The 1954 film was made fast (and cheap) and furiously marketed to drive-in double bills.

There’s a quick pre-titles scene of a truck crashing and burning, there’s the altercation in the diner, and there are shots of sports cars racing over curving mountain roads in the last 10 or so minutes, but by and large the action and suspense boils down to the love-hate relationship between Webster and Connie.

Webster doesn’t do himself any favors, spending a big chunk of the movie manhandling Connie and barking at her. At one point, when they’re stalled at the side of the road, Connie nervously observes that “It’s almost midnight”; Webster counters with a snarky “Do you ride off on a broom?”

Webster is beginning to regret his decision to kidnap Connie.

Amazingly, Connie seems to be able to get past the rough exterior (not to mention the death threats) to see the good in Webster. But she swings wildly between hatching escape plans and aiding and abetting his escape. In one scene, she impulsively snatches the key out of the ignition while Webster is driving and throws it into the brush. Then, minutes later, she coquettishly waves a spare key in front of the flummoxed man’s face. You want to reach through the screen, shake her and tell her to make up her mind.

It’s at the shack on the racing grounds, hiding out from the police, that the accidental couple finally declare their love for one another. After spending the night there, Connie thinks that Webster is going to do the right thing and turn himself in, but is shocked when it becomes obvious that he's still going to make a run for it.

It’s a wealthy socialite's innocent trust in the system vs. a working man’s cynicism:

Connie: "You go to Mexico and you’ll give up the only chance you’ve got!"
Webster: "That’s not the way I see it.…"
Connie: "Don’t you want me?"
Webster: "You’re the most beautiful thing I’ve ever known, but I can’t afford to stay."
Connie: "Oh but you’re innocent!"
Webster: "It isn’t what you are that counts… It’s what you get taken for!"
Connie: "Someday what you really are is going to catch up with you. It’s worth fighting for, I just hope it isn’t too late…"

This being a ‘50s drive-in movie, we’re reasonably sure that trust in the system is ultimately going to prevail, but not before a few more dramatic setbacks. After Webster locks Connie in, promising to alert help once he’s safely in Mexico, she yells her lungs out to no avail. Then, in one of the most boneheaded moves ever, she lights some old rags on fire near the wooden door to … send out smoke signals? Burn the door down? It’s not clear, since she’s far more likely to succumb to smoke before any of those things can happen.

Connie tries one last time to convince Webster to give himself up after
spending the night at the Love Shack (apologies to the B52s).

SPOILER ALERT!

Well, of course she’s rescued in the nick of time so she can fight for her man another day. But please kids, don’t try this at home!

The protagonists’ knuckle-headed moves aside, The Fast and the Furious is a pretty watchable low-budget action-thriller-romance due to the two leads. While John Ireland was never the most expressive of actors, at various points he gets to rattle off classic hard-boiled lines and zingers like a human machine gun.

Dorothy Malone is very sympathetic as the mixed up rich girl, even as the audience is scratching their heads wondering what her character will do next. In the 1940s Malone flirted with stardom working for RKO and Warner Bros., but by the time The Fast and the Furious began shooting, she was not commanding big paychecks. She managed to snag an Oscar for best supporting actress in Douglas Sirk’s lush soap opera Written on the Wind (1956) before transitioning to mostly TV roles. While The Fast and the Furious was a mere road bump in Malone’s career, it was a far more significant milestone for producer Roger Corman and his star John Ireland.

Corman was fresh off the success of his very first film as sole producer, Monster from the Ocean Floor (1954), when he decided to do The Fast and the Furious. For Monster, he received a $60,000 advance against distribution profits on a film that cost him a paltry $10K to make. Not wanting to let the grass grow under his feet, he sunk a significant chunk into his new project. This would become standard operating procedure.

In his memoir, How I Made a Hundred Movies in Hollywood and Never Lost a Dime, Corman relates:

“My career took a dramatic turn and picked up velocity with The Fast and the Furious. First, this was a considerably bigger, more intricate production. Second, I used the film to get a three picture deal with a new independent production and distribution company -- eventually called American International Pictures. That deal marked the beginning of a long, prosperous relationship stretching over fifteen years and thirty-plus films. And third, I made the decision after Fast and Furious to direct films, not only for the greater overall control but for the creative challenge.” [Roger Corman and Jim Jerome, How I Made a Hundred Movies in Hollywood and Never Lost a Dime, Da Capo Press, 1998, p. 23]

Jim Nicholson and Samuel Arkoff were just starting out with American Releasing Corporation, (soon to morph into American International Pictures), and The Fast and the Furious was only the second film to be released under the ARC banner. Roger Corman was just the man to supply the fledgling enterprise with films made furiously fast and cheap. The partnership spawned such legendary quickie classics as The Little Shop of Horrors (1960) and the comparatively lush Poe pictures starting with House of Usher (1960).

With just this second producing job, Corman was already a master of economizing. Ireland, who by that point had dozens of films under his belt, initially turned down the Webster role, but came on board at a cut rate when Corman okayed his request to direct the film.

John Ireland races to the set of The Fast and the Furious after
getting the word that he can direct.

Much of the racing footage was shot at an actual event, the Jaguar Open Sports Car race in Monterey, CA, obviating the need to rent cars and drivers.

Corman also immersed himself in other aspects of filmmaking, doing second unit directing, appearing uncredited in a small role as a highway cop, and even performing some stunt driving. This latter job brought out the man’s competitive spirit in a humorous way:

“I also went behind the wheel of the lead heavy’s car and raced in the key action sequence. Because I couldn’t afford two stunt drivers, John, who directed the long master shot, put our one driver in his own white Jag. Coming around the final turn neck and neck, knowing the other driver was supposed to surge ahead and win -- I got carried away and beat him, ruining the first take. John ran to the track and said, ‘What the hell are you doing out there?’ I said, ‘He wasn’t going fast enough. I wasn’t exactly going to hit the brakes and let him pass.' … We got it right the second time and the white car overtook me and won. The truth was, I really just wanted to floor it and win. I hated to lose.” [Ibid., pp. 24-5]

Corman kept learning. Compared to his later action-thrillers, The Fast and the Furious is pretty mild and slow-paced. Still, it’s worth watching for the “will they or won’t they?” tug-of-war between Webster and Connie and the hard-as-nails dialog.

Roger finally lets the white car win.

Where to find it: The Fast and the Furious is currently streaming down the internet superhighway here and here.

Crooks vs. Creatures, Part 3: Creature from the Haunted Sea

Now Playing: Creature from the Haunted Sea (1961)

Pros: Robert Towne as an inept secret agent and Betsy Jones-Moreland as a glamorous gangster’s moll deliver some chuckles.
Cons: The rushed, ad hoc nature of the production is readily apparent.

This month I'm pleased to be participating in the Distraction Blogathon at Taking Up Room. Host Rebecca has invited fellow bloggers to write about a movie or list of movies that “have distractions in them, whether it’s a MacGuffin, red herring, dangling carrot or any other kind of hook.” (If you haven't already, click over to the blogathon page for many more cinematic variations on the theme.)

Back in 2020 I wrote about “Disguise, Distraction and Deletion in B-Movie Posters,” so distraction, at least as far as the marketing of films goes, is right up my alley. One of the prime exhibits in that post was the poster you see here for Roger Corman’s Creature from the Haunted Sea. Let’s just say there is nothing in the movie that even remotely resembles the owner of the giant clawed hand, which, for a kid back in 1961 trying to figure out what movie he should spend his hard-earned allowance on, was something of a distraction (I’m not saying I was that kid, and I’m not saying I wasn’t…)

But the distractions aren’t limited to just an exaggerated marketing campaign. Creature’s plot is full of distractions, charades and double crosses as an American mobster schemes to steal a fortune in gold from a group of corrupt Cuban military officers who looted the national treasury before fleeing Fidel Castro’s revolution.

Creature from the Haunted Sea is not only a good fit for the Distraction blogathon, it’s also a perfect fit for the third installment of my Crooks vs. Creatures series, featuring interesting mashups of crime, sci-fi and horror. Part One featured another Roger Corman produced low-budget shocker, Beast from Haunted Cave (with connections to Creature from the Haunted Sea we’ll get to later); Part Two looked at the offbeat, micro-budget saga of The Astounding She-Monster.

So this post is doubling as an entry in the Distraction blogathon and in my own Crooks vs. Creatures series. Somehow, I think Roger Corman, who never missed an opportunity to save time and money by reusing sets and doubling up on locations by shooting movies back-to-back, would understand.

Creature was the second time Roger had squeezed blood out of a stone as far as location shooting was concerned. In the late '50s, Roger, along with his brother Gene (also a producer), decided to dump their usual Southern California shooting locations for the exotic locale of Deadwood, South Dakota. To get the most out of the expense of transporting people and equipment halfway across the country, they made it a 2-for-1 deal, shooting two movies in quick succession with the same cast and crew. One was a conventional war picture, Ski Troop Attack (1959) and the other an oddball crime/sci-fi/horror mashup, Beast from Haunted Cave (1959). In Beast, a gang of crooks pull off a daring daylight bank job, only to encounter a mysterious monster in the woods when they try to make their getaway.

For Beast, screenwriter Charles B. Griffith dusted off a script he’d previously done for Corman, Naked Paradise (1957), and added a monster to give it maximum drive-in appeal. Both Naked Paradise and Beast feature an unwitting local outdoorsman who is hired by crooks to help guide them through rugged terrain and escape with their ill-gotten loot.

In the beginning, Naked Paradise begat the Beast, and the Beast begat the Creature...

At the dawn of the ‘60s, Corman was at it again, this time locating to Puerto Rico to take advantage of “manufacturing” incentives that included film production. He simultaneously produced one war picture, Battle of Blood Island (1960), while producing and directing a sci-fi psychological drama, Last Woman on Earth (1960) on the island.

In his memoir, Roger recalled having such a blast shooting Last Woman that he impulsively decided to do another movie before pulling up stakes in Puerto Rico:

“Last Woman was a two-week shoot. It was going so well and we were having such a good time that I decided to do another movie. I called Chuck Griffith in L.A. and woke him up. ‘Chuck, I need another comedy-horror film and you’ve got a week to write it,’ I said. … He was very sleepy and I wasn’t certain he understood completely the story line we discussed, but he agreed. I would use the same three leads from the first movie [Last Woman], plus pick up some local Puerto Rican actors. …

The story was truly insane: We are in the closing days of Batista’s Cuba in the 1950s and some of his generals are absconding with a chest full of gold and must get a boat to sail from Cuba in the middle of the night. The only man they can trust is an American gambler and gangster [Antony Carbone as Renzo Capetto]. He and his assistant [Robert Bean as Happy Jack Monahan] then plot to kill off the generals one by one, blaming a sea monster for the killings. The plan is to end up with all the gold. The trouble is there actually is a sea monster and it looks exactly like the one the gangster invented.” [Roger Corman with Jim Jerome, How I Made a Hundred Movies in Hollywood and Never Lost a Dime, Da Capo Press, 1990, p. 71]

The three leads from Last Woman that Corman brought over to Creature were Carbone, Betsy Jones-Moreland and Robert Towne. If there is any saving grace to this hurried example of Corman’s ad hoc moviemaking, it’s the presence of Jones-Moreland and Towne.

Robert Towne’s participation as an actor is yet further testimony to Corman’s “efficiency.” Towne is one in a long list of celebrated filmmakers and actors who got their starts working for Roger. An award-winning screenwriter, producer and director, Towne penned such ‘70s classics as Shampoo and The Last Detail, and won a best original screenplay Oscar for Chinatown.

At the time of Last Woman and Creature, Towne was a young writer trying to get into the film business. Corman, always on the lookout for promising talent, commissioned him to write the script for Last Woman. Towne was taking too long, so Roger decided to hustle him off to Puerto Rico to finish the script on location, and make him do double-duty as an actor for good measure. [Corman and Jerome, p. 70]

Even setting aside the script writing duties, this was a tall order for any actor, not to mention a first-timer. Last Woman was an intense, post-apocalyptic psychological thriller that had Towne vying with Antony Carbone for the affections of the last woman on earth, Betsy Jones-Moreland. In stark contrast Creature from the Haunted Sea was a goofy sci-fi comic opera featuring a jury-rigged sea monster that would make a five year old snort in disbelief.

Corman had the Midas touch as far as converting rough but promising filmmaking talent into Hollywood gold. He’d throw his wet-behind the ears proteges straight into the deep end, and more often than not they’d start swimming laps instead of sinking. While Towne was never celebrated for his acting, when Roger threw him into the acting pool, he tread water very nicely (but he did cover his bets by adopting an alias, Edward Wain, for these first two acting credits).

In Creature, Towne plays U.S. agent XK150, aka Sparks Moran, who is assigned to infiltrate Capetto’s gang and keep tabs on the stolen gold. Creature immediately lays all of its comic cards on the table as it opens with a close-up shot of a shoe-shine boy/secret contact buffing Moran’s canvas sneakers as he stuffs a message from headquarters into the agent’s sock.

Robert Towne does a perfect Nicholas Cage imitation... before Cage was even born!

In another bit of business, Moran, who has gotten himself hired as one of Capetto’s deckhands, finds an out-of-the-way place on the boat to radio back to HQ. He uses a makeshift radio made out of parts disguised as hotdogs and pickles (!?), but has to eat one of the parts when another gang member stops by and comments on how tasty his lunch looks.

Towne plays it perfectly straight as he delivers such lines as, “It was dusk. I could tell because the sun was going down.” and “As a trained espionage agent I could tell she was attracted to me.”

Moran immediately falls hard for Capetto’s glamorous “moll,” Mary-Belle (Jones-Moreland). A single sneer from Mary-Belle drives the men wild with lust. Jones-Moreland is at her aloof best in a scene where she’s sunbathing on the boat while a Cuban general tries to flirt with her through his interpreter.

Interpreter: “The general says, ‘good morning you gorgeous, beautiful creature.’”
Mary-Belle: “Would you ask the general to remove himself from my presence?”
Interpreter (to the general): “She says, ‘good morning to you general!’”
[Then, after the interpreter has conveyed more of the clueless general’s salacious compliments…]
Mary-Belle: “Would you tell the general that I feel he would be most at home slowly barbecuing over a hot spit?”

Later, Jones-Moreland vamps it up as she sings the Creature from the Haunted Sea theme song in a sort of winking homage to the torch song numbers that were a staple of ‘40s hard-boiled crime thrillers.

Sparks fly as Moran tries to convince Mary-Belle to run away with him.

Not everything in Creature is comedy gold, however (or even silver or bronze for that matter). One of Capetto’s men, Pete (Beach Dickerson), is a nitwit whose specialty is making animal noises (furnished by a sound library that seems to have been ripped from a Tarzan movie). The act gets old real fast, and audience patience wears dangerously thin when Pete discovers the love of his life -- a homely middle-aged woman who is one of the few inhabitants of the island where the boat has run aground. Unfortunately, the film wastes precious minutes running that unfunny relationship into the ground.

When Corman made his impulsive decision to extend the stay in beautiful Puerto Rico and make another movie, he naturally went to his go-to writer at the time, Charles B. Griffith. Griffith had already penned over a dozen movies for Corman, and was someone who could be relied upon to cook up a script in no time.

Corman wanted to do a comedy-horror picture because of the surprise success the duo had achieved earlier with two black comedies, A Bucket of Blood (1959) and The Little Shop of Horrors (1960). Due to the insane schedule, Griffith had no choice but to once more recycle the Naked Paradise narrative of crooks hiring a guide to help them make off with their loot.

While Creature does have some inspired moments with Moran, Mary-Belle and the Cuban generals, there are too many dull stretches and sophomoric comic bits that would make a middle-school thespian blush with embarrassment. It kept the cast and crew basking in the tropical sun for another couple of weeks, and it looks like it was a blast to make, but it taxes the audience’s patience with its rushed script and in-your-face cheapness.

And then there’s the distraction of the Creature itself. It’s so ridiculous looking that the first time I saw the film, I thought it was one of Capetto’s men made up in a hastily improvised suit to scare the Cubans away for good. “Hasty” and “improvised” are the operative words for it, but for the purposes of Corman’s and Griffith’s cracked story, it’s supposed to be the “real” sea creature that coincidentally starts following the boat even as Capetto is plotting to bump off the Cubans and blame it on an imaginary monster.

The cast discuss their plans for an extended two-week stay in sunny Puerto Rico.

While Griffith was able to deliver a script at the last minute, Corman's former go-to monster-maker, Paul Blaisdell, was unavailable. Blaisdell had created imaginative (and inexpensive) monster suits and effects for several of Roger’s low-budget wonders of the ‘50s, including The Beast with a Million Eyes (1955), Day the World Ended (1955), It Conquered the World (1956) and Not of This Earth (1957), but by the early '60s Blaisdell had become disillusioned with the film industry.

Instead, Roger tapped Beach Dickerson, the actor who played Pete, to work up a costume:

“Then Roger said to me, ‘We have to make a monster [that] can run on land and swim underwater.’ … I said, ‘What do you mean, we? Every time you say ‘we,’ you don’t do a thing.’ He said, ‘Beach, I know you can do it, so don’t worry about it.’ I said, ‘How much money are we talking about Roger?’ He said, ‘Well, for a monster that can run on land and swim underwater, I think a hundred and fifty dollars should be sufficient.’ ‘Including materials?’ ‘Of course including materials!’ Well, this kid -- Bobby Beam, another actor in the movie -- and I made a monster … and the thing held up. For one hundred and fifty dollars! …
[We] stole army helmets and stacked them to form its face. We draped its body in oilcloth, to give it a sleazy look, and we gave it fangs -- we cut out holes and pasted in the teeth. We got two tennis balls and a ping pong ball and cut them in two -- that was the monster’s eyes. Then we draped it in steel wool. That monster was seven and half feet tall -- we spent a fortune on steel wool. Those were the good old days.” [The Movie World of Roger Corman, J. Philip di Franco, ed., Chelsea House, 1979, p. 23]

It looks jaw-droppingly comical, which I suppose is fine for a movie that plays things strictly tongue-in-cheek. Except that Creature’s marketing at the time (exhibit A: the poster) gave no hint that the film was a comedy, unlike its predecessors, A Bucket of Blood and Little Shop of Horrors. It’s perhaps an indication that Corman wasn’t sure that Creature could stand on its own two comic feet like the other films. Over the years, it hasn’t garnered quite the same sort of cult reputation as its cousins.

Still, Creature does have Robert Towne’s dead-pan schtick and Betsy Jones-Moreland's diva act going for it. And that monster -- ya gotta admire the sheer audacity of that bug-eyed abomination!

"Darling, you look like a hundred and fifty bucks!"

Where to find it: You can cast your fishing line just about anywhere and hook the Creature; e.g., here and here.  

Roger Corman's Price-less Poe Picture

Now Playing: The Premature Burial (1962)

Pros: As usual for a Corman Poe adaptation, the cinematography and production design make for a sumptuous and expensive-looking B-movie.
Cons: Adds a lot of padding to a simple story, resulting in slow pacing and dull stretches; the reveal at the climax is predictable and disappointing.

The idea of being mistaken for dead and buried alive seems so antiquated to us advanced lifeforms living in the 21st century. Medical science has progressed way beyond the hoary old cliches of checking for a pulse and holding a mirror up to the nose to detect a faint breath. We can diagnose brain death now, and all those crude methods for determining death were long ago buried by history and science.

Or so we thought. I don’t want to scare you, but for all our vaunted technology and expertise, misdiagnosed death is still a thing. In 2014, there was a case of a 78 year old hospice patient who was declared dead, only to wake up the next day in a body bag in the morgue. The same year, a woman who was declared brain dead at a New York hospital revived just as she was being prepared for organ harvesting.

Fortunately, such cases of Lazarus Syndrome are rare -- only 38 cases have been reported since the syndrome was first described in the medical literature in 1982. [Honor Whiteman, “The Lazarus Syndrome: When the ‘Dead’ Come Back to Life,” MedicalNewsToday.com, May 2017]

But that’s cold comfort for anyone who has been unlucky enough to be prematurely given up for dead. The same Medical News Today article describes the hair-raising experience of a UK woman with “locked-in syndrome,” a form of catalepsy wherein

“...a patient is aware of their surroundings, but they experience complete paralysis of voluntary muscles, with the exception of muscles that control eye movement.

In 2014, The Daily Mail reported on 39-year-old British woman Kate Allatt, who had locked-in syndrome. Unaware of her condition, doctors declared her brain dead. Medics, family, and friends stood by her bedside and discussed whether or not to switch off her life support. Allatt heard everything, but she was unable to tell them that she was fully conscious.

‘Locked-in syndrome is like being buried alive,” said Allatt. “You can think, you can feel, you can hear, but you can communicate absolutely nothing.’” [Ibid.]

With knowledge of such uncomfortably recent documented cases, the protagonist’s obsession in The Premature Burial becomes more relatable and less dated.

Ray Milland plays a wealthy middle-aged bachelor, Guy Carrell, who lives with his sister Kate (Heather Angel) in a gloomy mansion located in the fog-shrouded countryside somewhere in England. Guy’s mood is as gloomy as his surroundings, as he has recently witnessed the disinterring of a body for medical research purposes. To his horror, he saw that bloody scratches on the inside of the coffin and a look of abject terror frozen on the corpse's face indicated the poor man had been buried alive.

This poor fellow is the star of Premature Burial's pre-titles sequence.

This sends him into a deep depression. When Guy’s beautiful fiancee Emily (Hazel Court) shows up uninvited at the mansion, he tries to send her away, telling her that due to a family curse, they can never be married. It seems that his father was subject to cataleptic episodes, and when Guy was 13, the man slipped into a trance, was declared dead of a heart attack, and was promptly interred in the family vault below the mansion.

That night, Guy heard his father’s cries dimly echoing from the vault, but he couldn’t get anyone to believe him. Guy is morbidly afraid that catalepsy runs in the family, and that at any moment he will have an episode and share his father’s terrible fate. Sister Kate sternly dismisses the notion that their father was buried alive, and Emily is able to convince Guy that he will fare much better with her by his side.

They are soon married, with many well-wishers in attendance, including Emily’s father, Dr. Gideon Gault (Alan Napier) and family friend Miles Archer (Richard Ney). The happy mood is quickly dispelled, however, when the new bride, prompted by the guests, sits down to the piano to play. She picks an old folk tune, Molly Malone, which coincidentally, one of the gravediggers was whistling when they dug up the man who had been buried alive.

Guy and Emily relax by taking a walk in a fog-shrouded cemetery. Uh-huh.

This sets Guy off into another bout of paranoia, and instead of going to Italy on a honeymoon, he uses his time and resources to construct a mausoleum with more fail-safe ways for a misdiagnosed “dead” man to free himself than you can shake a gravedigger’s shovel at.

Emily, chafing at being holed up in the gloomy house with her obsessed husband, teams up with Miles to convince Guy to tear down the mausoleum and free himself of his gnawing fear. But when they try to seal the deal by opening up Guy’s father’s crypt to prove he wasn’t interred alive, it backfires spectacularly, and Guy’s worst nightmare comes true.

All the elements of Roger Corman’s justifiably admired Poe adaptations are present in The Premature Burial (except for one -- Vincent Price -- which we’ll get to in a moment). The lush cinematography was by Floyd Crosby, who had lensed The Pit and the Pendulum the year before and would carry on with The Raven, Tales of Terror, and The Haunted Palace in the next couple of years.

Art director/production designer Daniel Haller was a genius at making Corman’s Poe pictures, budgeted in the mid $100,000s, look like a million bucks (or two).

Two very talented writers contributed the screenplay. In addition to Premature Burial, Charles Beaumont penned The Haunted Palace and The Masque of the Red Death for Corman, as well as some of The Twilight Zone’s most beloved episodes for Rod Serling, before his untimely death in 1967. Ray Russell was also a celebrated master of horror, whose credits include the source novel and screenplay for William Castle’s Mr. Sardonicus, and X: The Man with the X-Ray Eyes (a Corman cheapie that has gained an authentic and loyal cult following over the years, and features one of Ray Milland’s best performances).

In spite of all the talent behind it, The Premature Burial suffers from a lack of energy and suspense compared to Corman’s other Poe adaptations. The problem stems partly from the need to pad the main elements from the original short story -- a horrible discovery in a reopened crypt and the building of a “fail-safe” tomb to avoid a similar fate -- with filler to bring it up to feature length.

Raiders of the Lost Tomb, aka Guy and friends and family.

The film passes on too many spine-chilling opportunities. Guy relates a story about hearing his supposedly dead father crying out from the vault, but we don’t hear it directly (unlike Corman’s first Poe film House of Usher, where the audience, along with Roderick, hears his sister scratching and screeching in her tomb). The intermittent use of the Molly Malone tune that sends Guy into paranoid fits doesn’t quite cut it.

Premature Burial uses up most of its energy in a scene where Guy, manic with anxiety, shows off his new mausoleum to Emily and Miles. They stand there gaping as he demonstrates a trick coffin that opens from the inside, a belltower that can be rung by the “dead” man after he’s woken up, an escape hatch on the roof and rope ladder for access, and if all else fails, dynamite to blast the tomb open. And if that fails, there's poison on hand for the ultimate exit. It’s all so elaborate, it would make Wiley Coyote's head spin.

This is quickly followed by an hallucinogenic nightmare sequence in which Guy is trapped in the mausoleum -- seemingly years after he’s been placed there -- and every fail-safe contraption fails spectacularly. That really reminded me of poor Wiley.

Guy's mausoleum is the work of the finest designers on the planet:
Wiley Coyote and Rube Goldberg.

From there, the film grinds down to an ending that, for all its morbid imagery, lacks any real suspense, and features a “twist” that you can see coming for miles.

It’s tempting to conclude that much of the film’s problems lie with the absence of Vincent Price in the title role. Ray Milland was a talented, award-winning actor, and he would prove just how much he could do with a B horror role with his inspired performance in The Man with the X-Ray Eyes. But Price was born to star in Corman’s Poe pictures, and his absence is a letdown. On the other hand, I suspect Vincent would only have made a nominal improvement. The script spends too much time with various characters trying to talk Guy down from his morbid delusions (not to mention the time spent showing off the mausoleum contraptions), and not enough on the horrors that have driven the man to near-insanity in the first place.

Corman wanted to make The Premature Burial with Vincent Price and without the involvement of American International Pictures, but again, like a Roadrunner cartoon, his best laid plans went astray. As Corman biographer Beverly Gray recounts:

[The Premature Burial] was a direct result of the Corman brothers’ [Roger and Gene’s] business relationship with Pathé American. Pathé’s owner, William Zeckendorf, had originally agreed to distribute The Intruder [Roger Corman’s social message movie about racial tensions in the Deep South] in exchange for Roger’s promise to shoot a Poe adaptation for his company. When [AIP head] Sam Arkoff got wind of the arrangement, which threatened the AIP monopoly on the highly lucrative Poe films, he warned that AIP would retaliate by withdrawing its business from Pathé’s respected film laboratory. Zeckendorf capitulated, and Corman was surprised to see Nicholson and Arkoff show up on the set of The Premature Burial, cheerfully informing him that he was once again working for them.” [Beverly Gray, Roger Corman: An Unauthorized Biography of the Godfather of Indie Filmmaking, Renaissance Books, 2000, p. 76]

To add insult to injury, when Corman started the project with Pathé’s backing, Vincent Price’s exclusive contract with AIP prevented him from appearing in the film. AIP took over anyway, and filming went ahead with Milland.

"I'm so glad I went with the sunroof option on this coffin!"

WARNING: AN IMPORTANT PLOT POINT REVEALED BELOW

A redeeming feature of the film is the presence of Hazel Court, who always brought elegance and class to her roles. By this point in her career, Court had established her horror credentials by appearing in Hammer’s groundbreaking Curse of Frankenstein and the less groundbreaking but nonetheless atmospheric The Man Who Could Cheat Death.

On the set of The Premature Burial she was the consummate trouper, to the point that she became uncomfortably familiar with the feeling of actually being buried alive. In her autobiography, Court recalls that she nixed the idea of a stunt double for the climactic scene:

“At the end of the picture, I had to be buried alive. Roger asked me if I would do it or if I would rather have someone double for me. I said, ‘Heavens no! I will do it.’ Well, I lay on the ground, with a straw in my mouth so that I would have air, as they shovelled the earth over me. The straw was removed when the director said ‘Action!’ I was to hold my breath for as long as possible. I made it for over one minute -- long enough to get the shot. As I got to the end of the minute, the pressure on my body began, as the claustrophobia was setting in. It was one hell of an experience.” [Hazel Court, Horror Queen: An Autobiography, Tomahawk Press, 2008, p. 112]

Acknowledging that The Premature Burial was not as successful as the other Poe films, Court offered her own theory.

“Some critics felt it was because Vincent Price wasn’t in it. I felt it might have been because a lot of people have fears of being buried alive -- or of developing the condition of catalepsy in which one would be alive but presumed dead. The film was kind to me, and as I’ve mentioned, a very good part.” [Ibid., p. 115]

Hazel rests after a hard day on the set.

Regardless of its deficiencies -- or its effectiveness in bringing on queasiness at the thought of being buried alive -- The Premature Burial features a talented cast, delivers a couple of morbidly imaginative scenes, and looks absolutely fabulous.

Where to find it: For the moment, The Premature Burial is streaming free for Amazon Prime subscribers, or own it on DVD or Blu-ray with an assortment of interesting extras.